OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DPNET: Dual-Path Network for Efficient Object Detectioj with Lightweight Self-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Object detection often costs a considerable amount of computation to get satisfied performance, which is unfriendly to be deployed in edge devices. To address the trade-off between computational cost and detection accuracy, this paper presents a dual path network, named DPNet, for efficient object detection with lightweight self-attention. In backbone, a single input/output lightweight self-attention module (LSAM) is designed to encode global interactions between different positions. LSAM is also extended into a multiple-inputs version in feature pyramid network (FPN), which is employed to capture cross-resolution dependencies in two paths. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art detection results. More specifically, DPNet obtains 29.0% AP on COCO test-dev, with only 1.14 GFLOPs and 2.27M model size for a 320x320 image.
Automated Hyperparameter Optimization Challenge at CIKM 2021 AnalyticCup
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we describe our method for tackling the automated hyperparameter optimization challenge in QQ Browser 2021 AI Algorithm Competiton (ACM CIKM 2021 AnalyticCup Track 2). The competition organizers provide anonymized realistic industrial tasks and datasets for black-box optimization. Based on our open-sourced package OpenBox, we adopt the Bayesian optimization framework for configuration sampling and a heuristic early stopping strategy. We won first place in both the preliminary and final contests with the results of 0.938291 and 0.918753, respectively.
RRFT: A Rank-Based Resource Aware Fault Tolerant Strategy for Cloud Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

The applications that are deployed in the cloud to provide services to the users encompass a large number of interconnected dependent cloud components. Multiple identical components are scheduled to run concurrently in order to handle unexpected failures and provide uninterrupted service to the end user, which introduces resource overhead problem for the cloud service provider. Furthermore such resource-intensive fault tolerant strategies bring extra monetary overhead to the cloud service provider and eventually to the cloud users. In order to address these issues, a novel fault tolerant strategy based on the significance level of each component is developed. The communication topology among the application components, their historical performance, failure rate, failure impact on other components, dependencies among them, etc., are used to rank those application components to further decide on the importance of one component over others. Based on the rank, a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model is presented to determine the number of replicas that varies from one component to another. A rigorous performance evaluation is carried out using some of the most common practically useful metrics such as, recovery time upon a fault, average number of components needed, number of parallel components successfully executed, etc., to quote a few, with similar component ranking and fault tolerant strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reduces the required number of virtual and physical machines by approximately 10% and 4.2%, respectively, compared to other similar algorithms.
Text Classification for Task-based Source Code Related Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

There is a key demand to automatically generate code for small tasks for developers. Websites such as StackOverflow provide a simplistic way by offering solutions in small snippets which provide a complete answer to whatever task question the developer wants to code. Natural Language Processing and particularly Question-Answering Systems are very helpful in resolving and working on these tasks. In this paper, we develop a two-fold deep learning model: Seq2Seq and a binary classifier that takes in the intent (which is in natural language) and code snippets in Python. We train both the intent and the code utterances in the Seq2Seq model, where we decided to compare the effect of the hidden layer embedding from the encoder for representing the intent and similarly, using the decoder's hidden layer embeddings for the code sequence. Then we combine both these embeddings and then train a simple binary neural network classifier model for predicting if the intent is correctly answered by the predicted code sequence from the seq2seq model. We find that the hidden state layer's embeddings perform slightly better than regular standard embeddings from a constructed vocabulary. We experimented with our tests on the CoNaLa dataset in addition to the StaQC database consisting of simple task-code snippet-based pairs. We empirically establish that using additional pre-trained embeddings for code snippets in Python is less context-based in comparison to using hidden state context vectors from seq2seq models.
Stochastic behaviour of an interface-based memristive device
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2021
Year: 2021

A large number of simulation models have been proposed over the years to mimic the electrical behaviour of memristive devices. The models are based either on sophisticated mathematical formulations that do not account for physical and chemical processes responsible for the actual switching dynamics or on multi-physical spatially resolved approaches that include the inherent stochastic behaviour of real-world memristive devices but are computationally very expensive. In contrast to the available models, we present a computationally inexpensive and robust spatially 1D model for simulating interface-type memristive devices. The model efficiently incorporates the stochastic behaviour observed in experiments and can be easily transferred to circuit simulation frameworks. The ion transport, responsible for the resistive switching behaviour, is modelled using the kinetic Cloud-In-a-Cell scheme. The calculated current-voltage characteristics obtained using the proposed model show excellent agreement with the experimental findings.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Smart City Application: A Secure and Trusted Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the disruptive technologies that is shaping the future. It has growing applications for data-driven decisions in major smart city solutions, including transportation, education, healthcare, public governance, and power systems. At the same time, it is gaining popularity in protecting critical cyber infrastructure from cyber threats, attacks, damages, or unauthorized access. However, one of the significant issues of those traditional AI technologies (e.g., deep learning) is that the rapid progress in complexity and sophistication propelled and turned out to be uninterpretable black boxes. On many occasions, it is very challenging to understand the decision and bias to control and trust systems' unexpected or seemingly unpredictable outputs. It is acknowledged that the loss of control over interpretability of decision-making becomes a critical issue for many data-driven automated applications. But how may it affect the system's security and trustworthiness? This chapter conducts a comprehensive study of machine learning applications in cybersecurity to indicate the need for explainability to address this question. While doing that, this chapter first discusses the black-box problems of AI technologies for Cybersecurity applications in smart city-based solutions. Later, considering the new technological paradigm, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), this chapter discusses the transition from black-box to white-box. This chapter also discusses the transition requirements concerning the interpretability, transparency, understandability, and Explainability of AI-based technologies in applying different autonomous systems in smart cities. Finally, it has presented some commercial XAI platforms that offer explainability over traditional AI technologies before presenting future challenges and opportunities.
Intrusion Detection using Spatial-Temporal features based on Riemannian Manifold
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Network traffic data is a combination of different data bytes packets under different network protocols. These traffic packets have complex time-varying non-linear relationships. Existing state-of-the-art methods rise up to this challenge by fusing features into multiple subsets based on correlations and using hybrid classification techniques that extract spatial and temporal characteristics. This often requires high computational cost and manual support that limit them for real-time processing of network traffic. To address this, we propose a new novel feature extraction method based on covariance matrices that extract spatial-temporal characteristics of network traffic data for detecting malicious network traffic behavior. The covariance matrices in our proposed method not just naturally encode the mutual relationships between different network traffic values but also have well-defined geometry that falls in the Riemannian manifold. Riemannian manifold is embedded with distance metrics that facilitate extracting discriminative features for detecting malicious network traffic. We evaluated our model on NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets and showed our proposed method significantly outperforms the conventional method and other existing studies on the dataset.
TriVoC: Efficient Voting-based Consensus Maximization for Robust Point Cloud Registration with Extreme Outlier Ratios
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Correspondence-based point cloud registration is a cornerstone in robotics perception and computer vision, which seeks to estimate the best rigid transformation aligning two point clouds from the putative correspondences. However, due to the limited robustness of 3D keypoint matching approaches, outliers, probably in large numbers, are prone to exist among the correspondences, which makes robust registration methods imperative. Unfortunately, existing robust methods have their own limitations (e.g. high computational cost or limited robustness) when facing high or extreme outlier ratios, probably unsuitable for practical use. In this paper, we present a novel, fast, deterministic and guaranteed robust solver, named TriVoC (Triple-layered Voting with Consensus maximization), for the robust registration problem. We decompose the selecting of the minimal 3-point sets into 3 consecutive layers, and in each layer we design an efficient voting and correspondence sorting framework on the basis of the pairwise equal-length constraint. In this manner, the 3-point sets can be selected independently from the reduced correspondence sets according to the sorted sequence, which can significantly lower the computational cost and meanwhile provide a strong guarantee to achieve the largest consensus set (as the final inlier set) as long as a probabilistic termination condition is fulfilled. Varied experiments show that our solver TriVoC is robust against up to 99% outliers, highly accurate, time-efficient even with extreme outlier ratios, and also practical for real-world applications, showing performance superior to other state-of-the-art competitors.
Evaluation of Human and Machine Face Detection using a Novel Distinctive Human Appearance Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Face detection is a long-standing challenge in the field of computer vision, with the ultimate goal being to accurately localize human faces in an unconstrained environment. There are significant technical hurdles in making these systems accurate due to confounding factors related to pose, image resolution, illumination, occlusion, and viewpoint [44]. That being said, with recent developments in machine learning, face-detection systems have achieved extraordinary accuracy, largely built on data-driven deep-learning models [70]. Though encouraging, a critical aspect that limits face-detection performance and social responsibility of deployed systems is the inherent diversity of human appearance. Every human appearance reflects something unique about a person, including their heritage, identity, experiences, and visible manifestations of self-expression. However, there are questions about how well face-detection systems perform when faced with varying face size and shape, skin color, body modification, and body ornamentation. Towards this goal, we collected the Distinctive Human Appearance dataset, an image set that represents appearances with low frequency and that tend to be undersampled in face datasets. Then, we evaluated current state-of-the-art face-detection models in their ability to detect faces in these images. The evaluation results show that face-detection algorithms do not generalize well to these diverse appearances. Evaluating and characterizing the state of current face-detection models will accelerate research and development towards creating fairer and more accurate face-detection systems.
Decoding of Polar Codes Based on Q-Learning-Driven Belief Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents an enhanced belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithm and a reinforcement learning-based BP decoding algorithm for polar codes. The enhanced BP algorithm weighs each Processing Element (PE) input based on their signals and Euclidean distances using a heuristic metric. The proposed reinforcement learning-based BP decoding strategy relies on reweighting the messages and consists of two steps: we first weight each PE input based on their signals and Euclidean distances using a heuristic metric, then a Q-learning algorithm (QLBP) is employed to figure out the best correction factor for successful decoding. Simulations show that the proposed enhanced BP and QLBP decoders outperform the successive cancellation (SC) and belief propagation (BP) decoders, and approach the SCL decoders.
Domain-adaptation of spherical embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Domain adaptation of embedding models, updating a generic embedding to the language of a specific domain, is a proven technique for domains that have insufficient data to train an effective model from scratch. Chemistry publications is one such domain, where scientific jargon and overloaded terminology inhibit the performance of a general language model. The recent spherical embedding model (JoSE) proposed in arXiv:1911.01196 jointly learns word and document embeddings during training on the multi-dimensional unit sphere, which performs well for document classification and word correlation tasks. But, we show a non-convergence caused by global rotations during its training prevents it from domain adaptation. In this work, we develop methods to counter the global rotation of the embedding space and propose strategies to update words and documents during domain specific training. Two new document classification data-sets are collated from general and chemistry scientific journals to compare the proposed update training strategies with benchmark models. We show that our strategies are able to reduce the performance cost of domain adaptation to a level similar to Word2Vec.
An Empirical Analysis of HTTPS Configuration Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

It is notoriously difficult to securely configure HTTPS, and poor server configurations have contributed to several attacks including the FREAK, Logjam, and POODLE attacks. In this work, we empirically evaluate the TLS security posture of popular websites and endeavor to understand the configuration decisions that operators make. We correlate several sources of influence on sites' security postures, including software defaults, cloud providers, and online recommendations. We find a fragmented web ecosystem: while most websites have secure configurations, this is largely due to major cloud providers that offer secure defaults. Individually configured servers are more often insecure than not. This may be in part because common resources available to individual operators -- server software defaults and online configuration guides -- are frequently insecure. Our findings highlight the importance of considering SaaS services separately from individually-configured sites in measurement studies, and the need for server software to ship with secure defaults.
URIR: Recommendation algorithm of user RNN encoder and item encoder based on knowledge graph
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Due to a large amount of information, it is difficult for users to find what they are interested in among the many choices. In order to improve users' experience, recommendation systems have been widely used in music recommendations, movie recommendations, online shopping, and other scenarios. Recently, Knowledge Graph (KG) has been proven to be an effective tool to improve the performance of recommendation systems. However, a huge challenge in applying knowledge graphs for recommendation is how to use knowledge graphs to obtain better user codes and item codes. In response to this problem, this research proposes a user Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder and item encoder recommendation algorithm based on Knowledge Graph (URIR). This study encodes items by capturing high-level neighbor information to generate items' representation vectors and applies an RNN and items' representation vectors to encode users to generate users' representation vectors, and then perform inner product operation on users' representation vectors and items' representation vectors to get probabilities of users interaction with items. Numerical experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that URIR is superior performance to state-of-the-art algorithms in indicators such as AUC, Precision, Recall, and MRR. This implies that URIR can effectively use knowledge graph to obtain better user codes and item codes, thereby obtaining better recommendation results.
On the number of $q$-ary quasi-perfect codes with covering radius 2
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper we present a family of $q$-ary nonlinear quasi-perfect codes with covering radius 2. The codes have length $n = q^m$ and size $ M = q^{n - m - 1}$ where $q$ is a prime power, $q \geq 3$, $m$ is an integer, $m \geq 2$. We prove that there are more than $q^{q^{cn}}$ nonequivalent such codes of length $n$, for all sufficiently large $n$ and a constant $c = \frac{1}{q} - \varepsilon$.
Unsupervised Discovery of Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present an unsupervised method to detect English unergative and unaccusative verbs. These categories allow us to identify verbs participating in the causative-inchoative alternation without knowing the semantic roles of the verb. The method is based on the generation of intransitive sentence variants of candidate verbs and probing a language model. We obtained results on par with similar approaches, with the added benefit of not relying on annotated resources.
LSTA-Net: Long short-term Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Network for Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Modelling various spatio-temporal dependencies is the key to recognising human actions in skeleton sequences. Most existing methods excessively relied on the design of traversal rules or graph topologies to draw the dependencies of the dynamic joints, which is inadequate to reflect the relationships of the distant yet important joints. Furthermore, due to the locally adopted operations, the important long-range temporal information is therefore not well explored in existing works. To address this issue, in this work we propose LSTA-Net: a novel Long short-term Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Network, which can effectively capture the long/short-range dependencies in a spatio-temporal manner. We devise our model into a pure factorised architecture which can alternately perform spatial feature aggregation and temporal feature aggregation. To improve the feature aggregation effect, a channel-wise attention mechanism is also designed and employed. Extensive experiments were conducted on three public benchmark datasets, and the results suggest that our approach can capture both long-and-short range dependencies in the space and time domain, yielding higher results than other state-of-the-art methods. Code available at https://github.com/tailin1009/LSTA-Net.
MEmoBERT: Pre-training Model with Prompt-based Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Multimodal emotion recognition study is hindered by the lack of labelled corpora in terms of scale and diversity, due to the high annotation cost and label ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a pre-training model \textbf{MEmoBERT} for multimodal emotion recognition, which learns multimodal joint representations through self-supervised learning from large-scale unlabeled video data that come in sheer volume. Furthermore, unlike the conventional "pre-train, finetune" paradigm, we propose a prompt-based method that reformulates the downstream emotion classification task as a masked text prediction one, bringing the downstream task closer to the pre-training. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MSP-IMPROV, show that our proposed MEmoBERT significantly enhances emotion recognition performance.
Interpretive Blindness
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

We model here an epistemic bias we call \textit{interpretive blindness} (IB). IB is a special problem for learning from testimony, in which one acquires information only from text or conversation. We show that IB follows from a co-dependence between background beliefs and interpretation in a Bayesian setting and the nature of contemporary testimony. We argue that a particular characteristic contemporary testimony, \textit{argumentative completeness}, can preclude learning in hierarchical Bayesian settings, even in the presence of constraints that are designed to promote good epistemic practices.
A mathematical model of the vowel space
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

The articulatory-acoustic relationship is many-to-one and non linear and this is a great limitation for studying speech production. A simplification is proposed to set a bijection between the vowel space (f1, f2) and the parametric space of different vocal tract models. The generic area function model is based on mixtures of cosines allowing the generation of main vowels with two formulas. Then the mixture function is transformed into a coordination function able to deal with articulatory parameters. This is shown that the coordination function acts similarly with the Fant's model and with the 4-Tube DRM derived from the generic model.